Elect the president

A few delegates liked the idea of popular election in a single national constituency, but that idea was exposed to two major objections. One was that it would disadvantage the Southern states, since the slaves who formed so large a portion of the Southern population would never vote. The other was that the difficulty of identifying candidates with truly national reputations would lead most citizens to scatter their votes among familiar names from their own states, making it nearly impossible for any candidate to receive a popular majority.

The obvious answer to this second objection was to vest the election of the president in Congress. That would solve the information problem, since no one could know more about fit “characters” than the nation's political elite. But the framers were also devoted to the idea of a constitutionally independent executive capable of resisting congressional meddling with his duties and willing to wield a veto over improper legislation. A president elected by Congress would lack the right stuff – unless he was restricted to a single term in office, which would only deprive the nation of the services of able officeholders who merited continuation in office.

There were, in short, decisive objections against the two obvious modes of election, and the idea of the Electoral College emerged only as a weak and less objectionable alternative to election by the people or Congress. The framers were not particularly optimistic that the electors would make an effective choice, or even be much better informed than the people themselves. Otherwise they might have allowed them to assemble in one place, rather than the separate states, and keep voting (much as the cardinals in Rome) until a choice was made and the white smoke of the ballots seen by the crowds outside. Many of them expected the electors to operate more like a primary system, nominating the finalists from whom the House of Representatives, voting by states, would make a final choice.

The one saving advantage of the final decision on presidential election, as the framers saw it, was that it built upon their two earlier compromises over representation. The more populous states (and especially the Southern states, because of the three-fifths clause) would have the overall advantage in promoting candidates in the first round, but the small states would gain increased influence on all those occasions when the election went into the House. And of course the small states would also be overrepresented in the first round of voting because of the two additional electors each gained by virtue of the “senatorial bump.”

To trace this history is to realize, first and foremost, that the whole Electoral College system was a hastily crafted expedient that testifies to the difficulties the framers faced in imagining how any scheme of electing a single national officeholder would work in a highly decentralized polity as the United States seemed destined to be and long remain.

One person, one vote

Because of that “senatorial bump,” the Electoral College scheme violates the fundamental democratic norm that says the votes of all citizens should count equally. The resulting inequality in the value of our individual votes might be justified if citizens in smaller states really had different interests from those of their more populous neighbors, if those interests deserved special recognition, and if presidential elections offered an effective way to protect those interests. But none of these conditions is true. The Electoral College preserves a structural inequality in which some votes arbitrarily count for more than others, solely by the accident of residence.